Some Details

While I’m not willing to name my new employer on the blog because I just have a personal rule about that, I can certainly do you better than just, “I’ve got a new job.”

The company is a pretty well known hosting service with offices downtown and they’re growing considerably right now. They’ve just added Web development services for small to medium-sized business clients and have seen a real boon in sales for these tools. My job title is design project manager (I am one of many) and I will work with clients and the company’s designers/programmers, to get the sites put together, tested and launched.

It’s pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for and the scope seems just small enough (in other words, I’m helping Mom & Pop get their model train store on the Web vs. working on the Coca Cola site or something) to challenge me and seriously build up my skills in this field, which I think I’m going to try to make an actual career of. Ewwww, career.

So yeah, I’m really pleased. After more than two years with a non-profit association I’m more than ready to jump back into a kind of dotcom “startup” environment and its slightly more employee friendly corporate culture. I may be trading some job security for casual Fridays but it’s a risk I’m willing to take!

One of the biggest benefits is that Tanya will be covered by my health insurance plan and we can stop shelling out $250 a month for her Kaiser Permanente. They also provide MARTA passes so I can ride the train and not worry about my car for a while longer, which, based on some of the sounds it’s making lately, is a good thing.

I’ve learned a ton in my current job, about myself and about project coordination and tracking, and I’ve made some lasting friendships with folks whose daily presence in my life is going to be dearly missed. But Tanya and I have some plans for the next year or two that will be better served by this transition and I’m ready to take on some new challenges. It might suck but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

The Palm

It’s sitting here and I have no idea what to do with it. I just keep taking stealth pictures of people doing random dumb things.

I did manage to enter all the addresses from my leather planner (the one I bought when I graduated from college in 1994) into Outlook and then synch it with Yahoo and the Palm so that my entire address book is at my fingertips no matter where I am. I’m a little bit pleased with myself about that. And I ordered a 128 MB expansion card so that I can use the music features.

I’m going to program about 20 minutes of music for my MARTA ride to work Monday–stuff that will pep me up and get me ready to bust down the door and take over the place. You can send suggestions for the playlist. Rebecca at work gave me a gift certificate to the iTunes music store that I haven’t used yet so if I don’t have it, I can buy it! And that’s all I’ve got to say right now. I’d tell you the woe-filled tale of our flat tire in Alabama and the problems we’ve created for ourselves while trying to replace it, but I think Tanya’s still a bit too angry about the whole thing for me to share it publicly yet. Suffice to say that we’re both feeling really stupid today.

Don’t you hate it when people allude to stuff in blogs and then don’t fill you in. Evil, isn’t it?